Summary

Establishing a safety and health program in your workplace is one of the most effective ways of protecting your most valuable asset: your workers. Losing workers to injury or illness, even for a short time, can cause significant disruption and cost—to you as well as the workers and their families. It can also damage workplace morale, productivity, turnover, and reputation.

Safety and health programs foster a proactive approach to “finding and fixing” workplace hazards before they can cause injury or illness. Rather than reacting to an incident, management and workers collaborate to identify and solve issues before they occur. This collaboration builds trust, enhances communication, and often leads to other business improvements. Employers who have implemented safety and health programs, including many who are in OSHA’s Voluntary Protection Programs (VPP) or the Safety and Health Achievement Recognition Program (SHARP) for small and medium-sized businesses, have also found that managing for safety results in higher-quality product or output and higher profits.